Do you belong more to souce first or to speakers first school of thought ?

I was just browsing through the amps and preamps forums, and came across this from @atmasphere 

If your preamp or source is lacking, it will not matter how good your amps and speakers are- they cannot make up for signal loss or coloration! The preamp has to be right!

For many years I believed in first getting the source right\.  In the course of that, I think my source/speakers ratio became way source heavy.

Good source will sound better on mediocre speakers than mediocre source will sound on good speakers. 

I think that there may be something to this.  

I would have defined "source" as ALL the electronics in front of the speakers, but I am thinking for the purposes of this discussion, that "source" refers to the first front end component in the system? 

@kingsleuy , I bought my very first system at the SAFB BX in ’79 and it was also a Magnavox! I did it on lay-away. (It would not have strapped onto the back of a mc though, I picked the rack system that had the biggest speakers of all of the rack systems they had. It must have been multiple boxes. I am not sure how I got it back to the barracks in my Mustang, but I did.)

Spend full budget on Shun mook discs and Shakti stones....no speakers and sources are needed. Just start singing, dancing and tossing shakti stones around   --> quickest path to audio nirvana.

That will only work if you cover all your walls with funny looking panels.  

I’ve done the totals on the MSRPs of what I am actually listening to and I am still under 30k. I’d love to go either way with 30k and 70k. Either way. (I don’t know what it would come to if I added up the stuff that is in a dormant state. There is actually enough dormant to create an extra system with stuff left over.) My electronics up front : speakers ratio is way heavy on the electronics end. At one time I was in the camp that felt good electronics could make average speakers shine and that poor electronics would bring good speakers down. Now I am not so sure about that. (And I realize that good, average and poor are all relative terms.)

Spend $30000 on speakers and $70000 on the rest. 

no budget for cables?

@grislybutter  (do you miss being called "Brown Bear"?), I suppose one could interpret that as 30k for the speakers (wow, I wish I could do that!) and then "the rest" would entail all of the electronics, speaker cables, interconnect cables, fuses, power cords, and all else assorted what-have-you one might deem necessary that is in front of the speakers.  One might even include room treatments as part of "the rest," although in the context of this thread, I realize that was not part of the topic.  But you know how these threads wander.  (I am going to go on record as saying I have personally never tried any exotic fuses, but I am curious.)

@immatthewj I was being sarcastic.

Ahhhh . . . I should have known.

Another +1 (or more) to @atmasphere  !

After 50 years in this hobby I’ve settled on the following hierarchy:
Amplifier
Source
Speakers
Cables
Room acoustics...

Blasphemy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!